


Scars

by ardentintoxication



Category: Mulan (1998)
Genre: Community: disney_kink, Domestic Violence, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Miscarriage, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, War, implied sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-08
Updated: 2011-06-08
Packaged: 2017-11-03 13:27:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/381819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ardentintoxication/pseuds/ardentintoxication
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fa Zhou is broken and Fa Li is falling to pieces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scars

He returns in armor.  
  
He returns limping.  
  
He returns changed.  
  
The first thing he does is sink into her arms. She runs her hands across his face – he grew a beard while he was gone – and feels the lines in his forehead that weren’t there when he left two years ago. She’s crying, and she knows she’s supposed to be happy that her husband has returned, but this rational thought is drowned in a flood of tears.  
  
Their dinner is quiet, neither one wanting to mention the war, and yet both aching to ask. He takes her hand when she reaches for the teapot and brings it to his face. She wipes his eyes with her thumb as he pulls her in to kiss him.  
  
Later that night, she finds the scar. It’s long and ragged, running deep into his hip, and her fingers brush across it. She pulls away when he hisses in pain. Even later, after the candles have gone out, she traces her lips around the scar until he isn’t hissing anymore – at least not from pain.

* * *

The next night, she asks him how he got it. He tells her about the Huns, how they took no prisoners and slew thousands of innocent people. Innocent people he saw, and had to bury with his own hands. He tells her about the people he saw fall under his blade, and how people praised him for their deaths and called him a hero. He shows her his other scars, too numerous to count, running along his back, his feet, his chest. Even after he falls asleep, she kisses each scar and watches his face relax.

* * *

Different dignitaries keep visiting, to congratulate him, and after the fifth she wants to scream at them to leave her and her husband alone. If she can see the tremors in his hands and the sadness in his face, why can’t they? After each one comes, she lies in bed with him and strokes his hair. She thinks about sending his mother out the next time a visitor comes to the gate. Maybe then they could exist in peace.  


* * *

Sometimes they don’t do anything before they go to bed. Sometimes they just fall in, exhausted, not in the mood for anything else. But she’ll hear him screaming in his nightmares, and she’ll wake up to hold his hand. The next morning, he won’t talk about it.  
  
He doesn’t want to talk about anything anymore.

* * *

She misses the times when he would call her his pear blossom, his sweet dumpling, and she would look at him and call him her brave soldier. She hates the Huns, and she hates the Emperor, and above all else she hates war. The war took her husband away and gave her back a stranger.

* * *

One day, she makes the mistake of sneaking up behind him while he’s sorting accounts, the way she used to when they were first married. She is pinned to the wall with his hand around her neck, and it is a long moment before he’s on the floor apologizing and she’s holding him in the softness of her chest and he’s sobbing and she’s weeping and they’re both holding on to each other as hard as they can.

* * *

She doesn’t tell him, the first time she thinks she might be pregnant. He doesn’t need another worry on top of everything else, and when, two weeks later, her time comes late and heavy, she is almost relieved. She doesn’t tell him the next time, or the time after that. He’s seen too many babies killed to have the burden of three who died before they were even born.  
  
She waits until she’s showing before she tells him about this one. The herbalist has told her that it’s probably a boy, but Zhou is sure that it’s a girl. He holds her like he hasn’t held her for five years and asks her what she thinks the name should be. She looks at the magnolia blossoms that are blooming overhead, and says they should name her Mulan.


End file.
